It’s 8:20 on Saturday morning and normally I am sitting out on the porch with my computer and spending that time just to relax and reframe for the weekend…I need that down time, before the whole world gets up…and always, outside, because otherwise I’m surrounded by everything I’m suppose to be doing, besides I like the fresh air…unfortunately today, there is no fresh air to be found…we’re getting smoke blown our way from North Carolina…it’s nasty, and stifling…so, I’m stuck inside, and not sure my creative juices are flowing the way I’d like…so, probably going to be a short entry…

I did want to take a quick moment to remember someone who just passed away, Mr. Tim Russert…he’s been a part of my Sunday mornings ever since I can remember. He’s a political junkie that inspired me and my fellow Americans to follow and become an active part of our political system, but the more I watch all the memorial TV clips…it shows what an amazing family man he was, and with father’s day being tomorrow, I’m sure he’s going to be exceptionally missed, Tim- Here’s to you, you will be missed.

I’ve been wondering something and maybe you other bloggers/blog readers can help…is it better to have a blog entry every day (or pretty much every day) even if some of those days are just lazy “fill-in” blog entries…like just funny pictures or random stuff you find online…or is it better to just have entries when you really have something to say?

Sorry to interrupt our normally scheduled programming, I am going out of town tonight, and will not be back until Sunday…I’m going back to Blacksburg, and will not have internet, so….I have some great fun post scheduled, but won’t be able to read comments or anything until Sunday night or Monday, so, please enjoy the commercial break, and we’ll return to our regular scheduled programming on Monday.

Can you imagine working for a company that has a little more
than 500 employees and has the following statistics:

* 29 have been accused of spousal abuse
* 7 have been arrested for fraud
* 19 have been accused of writing bad checks
* 117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
* 3 have done time for assault
* 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
* 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
* 8 have been arrested for shoplifting
* 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits
* 84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year…

Okay, so my first official blog…ummm…. where to begin…so much to tell…Well, I am by nature a very private person, so the whole blogging concept, is going to be kind of hard to get the hang of, but I’m going to do my best…. I guess I should probably start with some of the basics about me.

I’m a 24-year-old female who grew up in a small little town outside of Blacksburg, VA…yep Virginia Tech…that Blacksburg…I grew up with a single mom and two brothers; I’m in the middle. My older brother is David, and he’s…. 27 (I’m pretty sure.) And my little brother, John is 22…. I’ve always been much closer to my little brother, but love them both very much…my mom pretty much spent the last 20 some years raising us, pretty much on her own, my grandmother (or Granny) helped out a lot, but my father was pretty much MIA…my step mother tried quite a bit to make him be a good father, but, you can’t really make someone do that…he use to pay 75 dollars a month for child support for us, yep 75 total…so we were nearly always struggling…my mom worked full-time and tried to attend school as much as possible, and although I had a happy childhood, there was a lot of basic things that were missing, most of the time our heat didn’t work, we had a kerosene heater we kept in our kitchen and we huddle around in winter, or sometimes the stove, but electricity was expensive so, normally the kerosene heater…we’d have the smell of kerosene baked into us, and no matter how much scrubbing, you couldn’t make it go away…the electricity only worked in half of our trailer…we could never afford to have someone come fix it…or find out why it didn’t work…our front steps were rotting through, and there was no one to help fix them…our cars always had problems…and I learned a lot about being self-sufficient…to this day I am the only girl I know who can charge her oil or a flat…we were poor, there is no denying, but I learned so much from that, and that’s what I want to share here…you must be thankful for what you have, no matter how unfortunate you may think your life is.

Well…like I said, I grew up in a very small south western Virginia town (very rural area) and when I graduated high school moved to a pretty large coastal city…. I moved there because my (now) ex-husband was in the Navy and I was sick of having a long distance relationship with him, so I packed up and moved 6 hours away from home to be with him, well…obviously that didn’t work out so well, but I love the area I’m in, and don’t plan on going anywhere…. I well address that whole ex-husband thing in another blog….

I am actually in the process of moving in with my boyfriend of two years, we’ll call him J…. oh and just for the record, all the names above have been changed…I won’t use any real names of people in my life…that a way they stay anonymous also…but back to J…. he’s a fantastic man, and really enough great things could never be said about him, unfortunately right now he’s sick, so he’s not a very pleasant person to be around, but then again, most people aren’t pleasant when they’re sick…but anyways, he’s 42 years old, yep 18 years difference, which, well, you’ll soon see in future post, that it really is not that bad of a thing.

So, I graduated high school and moved away from home and have earned my Associate’s degree in general studies…and now, well, I’m not 100% sure what I want to do…you see, I’ve always loved writing, so I was considering going into journalism, but, that’s an extremely competitive field, and either you’re great, or you don’t have much of a future…so I considered business…I’m pretty good at it, right now I work in a car electronics shop and I’ve handled everything from payroll and inventory to personnel matters and scheduling, so I’ve got a pretty good grasp of it, but I happen to work around a lot of 40-somethings who hate there job and can’t really go anywhere else, because that’s all they know…so I want to do something I love…and I love food, I love to cook and I love to try new stuff, but if I become a chef, well they work all kinds of strange hours and it’d be kind of hard to have a family and never be home at night, on weekends or holidays…which is when people eat out and therefore chefs have to be working…so, I’m considering food writing, but we’ll see how that turns out…